Monthly Archive: April 2016

One of the challenges of academia is learning to work for yourself. Before my science life, I worked for a large bureaucracy, a small family business, and a medium-sized non-profit. And in all cases, someone else was telling me what to do. At the small business, my work was dictated to me on an hour-to-hour …

Back in February, I implored you to stop using unlinked footnotes in your blog posts. The intrepid Stephen Heard [1] of Scientist Sees Squirrel fame, not the 18th century governor of Georgia pointed out that that linking is a little kludgy. The return anchor can only be at the beginning of a paragraph, so it’s …

Congratulations! Your proposal was successful! You’ve been awarded a fellowship or grant! These are great words to read, and overall it’s a good thing to get a fellowship or grant as an early career researcher. But there are hidden costs to these awards, both in terms of your immediate finances and the risks you take …

Not too long ago, NPR’s Planet Money had a segment on what’s happened to women in computer science. It really struck a chord. To summarize, women were a mainstay of computer science from its earliest years up until 1984. Then, the number of women in computer science at universities started plummeting, while the number of …

Last week, I ran a Reddit Science AMA with collaborators Koen Hufkens and Josh Gray on climate change, phenology, and citizen science. In the morning, a general post went up describing our research. By the time we started replying to questions at 1 pm, there were more than 100 questions waiting for us! I skimmed …